Exploring features of highly productive research contexts in Asia: a comparison of knowledge production in educational leadership in Israel and Hong Kong

A recent review of research identified two Asian societies that represented “positive outliers” in the production of published knowledge on educational leadership and management: Hong Kong and Israel. These were the only Asian societies that had produced a critical mass of publications in this field in international journals over the past two decades. The current study examined the nature of the publication corpus from Hong Kong and Israel in an effort to understand factors that may have contributed to this capacity for high research productivity. The results suggested that different strategies may have accounted for research capacity development in these two societies. Directions are identified for future research.     

A sociocultural analysis of organisational learning

The concept of organisational learning has been widely debated and frequently contested by educationalists, but the specific processes and actions which constitute this form of learning have received relatively little research attention. This paper reports a three‐year empirical investigation into organisational learning in a large industrial complex, with the aim of clarifying the practices of organisational learning and interpreting them within sociocultural learning theory. A sociocultural model is proposed which identifies dialogue as the fundamental process by which organisations learn, and relational practices as the social structure which embeds the dialogue and makes it sustainable in a potentially conflictual environment. Three relational practices are analysed in detail: opening space for the creation of shared meaning, reconstituting power relationships and providing cultural tools to mediate learning. A pedagogy of organisational learning is defined in terms of participation in these practices, either as the carrier of a practice or as the facilitator of participation by others. The theoretical requirement that adult learning must be autonomous is reconciled with the concept of collective learning in pursuit of organisational goals by rejecting the notion of an individually‐contained self in favour of a relational concept of the self, in which autonomy is achieved by building relationships with others.     

Diversity and equality in academic publishing: the case of educational leadership

There have been ongoing criticisms of the field of educational leadership and management with respect to over-reliance on research from ‘Western’ contexts. However, evidence on the extent to which voices alternative to the dominant ‘Western’ discourse are represented in the international English-medium discourse of educational leadership and management is thin. Using a three-phase sequential mixed-methods approach, this paper explores knowledge production in the field by analysing the prevalence and impact of empirical articles published in four English-medium international journals. Additionally, the membership of editorial boards and editors is analysed to geographically locate key decision makers. Findings demonstrate that an exceptionally small set of core inner-circle Anglophone and non-inner-circle Anglophone settings enjoys disproportionate influence in the field. There is need for a knowledge base enriched with leadership and management practices from different sociocultural contexts and system structures with a multiplicity of voices to portray a more nuanced and balanced picture of leadership and management practices.     

A social epistemology for educational administration and leadership

ABSTRACT

As a field of knowledge production, educational administration and leadership scholars do a substantial amount of talking past one another. These parallel monologues are a major issue for the advancement of knowledge. Original contributions can only be made in relation to others. That is, the innovation or significance of scholarship is an act of (social) scientific distinction. This means purposely engaging with the other. In this paper, I argue that the knowledge frontiers of educational administration and leadership are highly fragmented and siloed. I do not, however, see diversity of scholarship as a fatal flaw nor do I argue for a form of knowledge centrism. Rather, my intervention is to propose a social epistemology for moving knowledge claims.     

中学后教育知识产业时代的大学领导与院校研究

产业是看待高等教育的新视角。高等教育产业经历了传统高等教育、大众化高等教育、中学后教育的发展阶段,正在向中学后教育知识产业阶段迈进。多样化、信息通讯革命、学术和院校质量、经济生产力、继续教育市场和全球化等挑战促成了中学后教育知识产业的发展,随之而来的是大学治理、大学领导方式的变革。院校战略规划强调实施,进而促进院校的改善,院校研究在战略规划中起着提供数据、咨询建议的作用。     

A review on leadership and leadership development in educational settings

Leadership gained a lot of attention during the past decades because of school principals' growing responsibilities and the accountability-driven context they work in. However, reviews providing a general overview of effective school leadership theories and effective professional development are rare. The present review was conducted to summarise the existing literature and discover lacunae in school leadership research in preschools, primary and secondary schools. 75 studies focusing on leadership theories, characteristics of effective school leadership and school leaders’ professional development were included and analysed. The present article provides an overview of main leadership theories such as instructional leadership, situational leadership, transformational leadership, distributed leadership and Leadership for Learning. Second, the article focuses on the characteristics of effective school leadership and lastly, the review offers features of effective professional development activities for school principals.     

Conceptualizing educational leadership in an academic development program

Promoting the development of educational leadership in higher education is essential for strengthening the quality of teaching and learning. Additional research is needed to conceptualize educational leadership, especially within informal roles. We analysed how faculty members in an academic development program conceptualized educational leadership. Five key characteristics emerged that inform the development of educational leadership capacity in postsecondary contexts: affective qualities, mentoring and empowering, action-orientation, teaching excellence, and research and scholarship. Three characteristics of academic programs aimed at developing educational leadership were also identified: funding and resources to implement a change initiative, building interdisciplinary communities, and embracing identity.     

Democratizing knowledge of teaching and learning through student leadership projects

ABSTRACT

The central focus of this multilayered educational action research project was three-fold: (1) to provide opportunities for public school student leadership activities grounded in participatory and youth participatory action research; (2) to support a group of teacher-researchers in practicing and innovating in participatory action research frameworks; (3) to practice linking an educational action research project in a local region to the larger movement for democratizing education knowledge production and dissemination. Project participants included 11 teacher-researchers, a staff-developer, a consultant, a university-based faculty member, and students in K-8 schools in the Lehigh Valley region of Eastern Pennsylvania USA. To move from a traditional top-down administrative and curricular decision- making model to a distributed and more democratic model of leadership, the team argues that (1) children must be permitted to play a leading role in their own learning, leading, and researching; (2) teacher offers significant advantages over traditional in-service based professional development models; and (3) in an era of increased deskilling and deprofessionalization, teachers must have the opportunity to reclaim their profession as they conduct research, create new knowledge, and share their findings publicly.     

Leading educational transformation in Asia: sustaining the knowledge society

This article explores the implications of the knowledge society for education and education systems. It focuses on how education systems in Asia are contributing to the development and sustainability of the knowledge society through creating powerful professional learning communities. The article explores how professional collaboration, at scale, is being used to generate social capital in order to promote educational transformation and improvement. The article draws upon a range of theoretical perspectives to examine how professional learning communities are contributing to educational improvement and the construction of new knowledge. The article concludes by arguing that disciplined, collective and inter-dependent learning is critical for the knowledge society to be sustained.     

Five literatures of organisation: putting the context back into educational leadership

In this article we develop the arguments of Glatter on the importance of adopting a more ‘organisation-oriented’ approach to educational leadership development. Through a critical review of current publications and national courses in the field, we argue that educational leadership is still very skills focussed at the expense of more sophisticated understandings of organisational context. This skills focus, or ‘agency without structure’, as Glatter puts it, encourages a ‘can do’ culture of simplistic solution-seeking rather than appreciation of complexity and paradox in the leadership experience which can produce better judgements. To identify such ‘understandings’, we then examine five traditions of thinking about ‘organisation’ through their related literatures. The first four, thinking psychologically, thinking structurally, thinking culturally and thinking politically, build on organisational ‘frames’. The fifth literature explores how these frames are constantly and variously brought into play through ‘complex responsive processes’ of organising in our daily work lives. Implications of this more organisation-focussed approach for educational leadership development are discussed through examples from the authors’ own research and teaching.     

Special educational needs coordinators and leadership: a role too far?

Although the National Standards for special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) (TTA, 1998) emphasised, as essential, their preparation for leadership, the extent to which SENCOs are formally recognised as leaders varies significantly. In this article, Lyn Layton provides perspectives on the SENCO role, collected through a small‐scale study, that include suggestions from SENCOs themselves that they should be part of senior leadership teams in order to work strategically. At the same time the article relates one view of leadership to the SENCO role, in order to consider how systemic changes in schools can promote the inclusion of pupils with diverse learning needs.     

Critical perspectives on changes in educational leadership practice

This paper examines a group of Chinese educational leaders’ leadership practice changes after undertaking a leadership development course offered by an Australian university in China. It presents their self-reported changes in leadership practice profiles and features selected vignettes. The study was primarily qualitative and interpretative, based on the interview responses of 20 participants. The findings showed that exposure to different perspectives appeared to expand participants’ views and equip them with a wider range of leadership strategies. Despite some observable differences in practices reported by participants from the three sectors (school, educational system, and university), there seemed to be more similarities than variance. The respondents were cautious about radical changes in leadership practice, reiterating that local contexts and cultures must be considered when accommodating Western educational ideas. The study suggests that participants’ self-reported changes in leadership practices resulted from mediation of contextual and cultural conditions rather than the direct transfer of Western ideas and practices into the Chinese context.     

Perspectives on knowledge management capabilities in universities: A qualitative identification of organisational factors

Prior research has had a limited approach to identifying organisational factors related to knowledge management (KM) practices of higher education institutions (HEIs), the centre for knowledge creation. This qualitative study explored such factors affecting KM capabilities from the perspectives of 30 full-time academics in public universities, and identified the dimensions of the KM capabilities framework. Results revealed that physical conditions, budget, human and technological resource management, division of labour, workload, time management, communication, bureaucracy, structural differentiation, motivation, individualism, and organisational behaviour affect KM infrastructure capabilities; bureaucracy, KM teams, institutional platforms, organisational structure, knowledge maps, vision, individual attitudes, academic collaboration, process management, budget, decision-making processes, sustainable academic KM, transparency, labour force, knowledge security, organisational culture, accessibility, and archiving affect KM process capabilities. These results contribute to identifying the organisational factors influencing KM that are critical to guiding practitioners and administrators of HEIs in developing more effective KM strategies and practices.     

Theorising the value of collage in exploring educational leadership

This article contributes to theorising the value of collage as a methodological approach. It begins with a discussion of the methodological difficulties of exploring hidden meanings and individual experience through the research process. The illuminative potential of arts‐based methodologies in qualitative research is then investigated. The article makes the case for the specific advantages of using collage to explore the experience of leadership, through a discussion of two collage‐based studies. It proposes a variant of the ‘think aloud’ process, used in conjunction with collage, as a route to producing deep understandings of the multiple ways in which leadership is experienced and understood as a social process. The argument is made that collage enables the accessing and sharing of profound levels of experience not accessible through words alone, and considers the impact of the physicality of collage on its potential to release these profound insights. A five‐stage process for the analysis of collage is then set out. The article concludes by offering a theory of the value of collage as a methodological approach to exploring experiences of leadership, through use of the concepts of physicality, wholeness and participant agency.     

Valuing knowledge over action: the example of gender in educational leadership

Gender inequalities in educational administration attract calls for research internationally. The degree of concern and the urgent search for cause and cure are characterised as within an epidemic logic, evoking a managerialist ‘scientific’ reliance on evidence-driven change. Taking a poststructuralist approach, the paper uses a study of South African women school principals to position gender research as a tool for change. It considers one area of their experience that impacts on their leadership, marriage, as a vehicle to explore how research might be used. The paper challenges Western Enlightenment teleological cultural assumptions. It suggests that knowledge may be all we have to continue the negotiation of power where there is no solid ground of rightness about what views and actions disempower or the contrary and that it may, in itself, be a powerful force in the face of intractable problems.     

Schoolteachers' constructions of desirable educational leadership: a career-stage perspective

The current study aimed at exploring desirable constructions of educational leadership among Israeli schoolteachers at three different career stages, as well as tracing the origins of these constructions. Based on semi-structured interviews with 10 teachers at early-career stage, 10 at mid-career stage and 10 at late-career stage, the study first found major commonalities among the interviewees with regard to emotional, moral, participative and structural constructions of educational leadership. But, ‘a second reading’ of the data unearthed subtle distinctions among the interviewees, deriving from the teacher's position in the career cycle. The early-career teachers hold an egocentric view of educational leadership while their late-career counterparts present a more multi-focal outlook. Empirical and practical implications are suggested.     

Gender in the neoliberalised global academy: the affective economy of women and leadership in South Asia

As higher education (HE) institutions globally become increasingly performative, competitive and corporatised in response to neoliberal rationalities, the exigencies of HE leadership are being realigned to accommodate its value system. This article draws on recent British Council-funded research, including 30 semi-structured interviews, to explore women’s engagement with leadership in HE in South Asia. A potent affective economy was discovered. Leadership was associated with affects such as competitiveness, aggression, impropriety, stress and anxiety, in ways that were intensified by highly patriarchal and corporatised HE cultures. Indeed, its difficulties and toxicities meant that leadership was rejected or resisted as an object of desire by many women. We illuminate how different forms of competition contribute to the affective economy of HE leadership. The research also raises wider questions about the possibilities of disrupting dominant neoliberal constructions of HE if those who question such values are excluded (or self-exclude) from leadership positions.     

图书馆管理与知识管理关系探析

知识经济时代,传统图书馆管理的种种弊端已不能适应新的时代要求。知识管理作为一种新的管理思想和工具,已在国内外许多企业内卓有成效地实施。研究知识管理与图书馆管理关系,借鉴知识管理思想,对于提升图书馆服务创新能力具有重要意义。     

Assessing impact: the role of leadership competency models in developing effective school leaders

The purpose of this case study is to examine the impact of the development and design of a district leadership competency model on leadership development outcomes in one Georgia school district. Specifically, we seek to illuminate the importance of Leadership Competency Models for (1) increasing clarity among aspiring leaders about the expectations for leadership within their system; (2) increasing shared understanding among school leaders and district administrators about the core elements of leadership required for success within their system; (3) increasing uniformity of practice in the identification and selection of candidates into the Aspiring Leader Program; and (4) improvements in the development and support provided for aspiring school leaders. As districts continue to work towards systemic improvement in leadership development nationwide, our findings have real-world implications for districts interested in identifying and developing aspiring leaders within their own systems.